True writing

 While in prison I found Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Wonderful books. Now she has a book of essays, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa)

The Conversation reviewed under True writing is a convulsive act: inside the mind of Elena Ferrante:

For many readers of Elena Ferrante’s celebrated novels of the relationships between girls and women, her stories are so distinctive they appear to have arrived fully formed. In the essays collected in her latest book, though, she offers a compelling account of the vital role her reading has played in the creation of her work.

Yep, another writers need to read message and then it goes forward.

Writing, like reading, requires this kind of alertness to the gifts of chance. Ferrante portrays the writer as a patient being, keeping an eye out in the work for the spark of something alive that will capture the chaotic energy of the world.

***

 The perhaps inevitable result of the tension between order and some disarranging force is an increasing dissatisfaction with the realist form, with its pretence that the world leaves the imprint of truth on the page without an intermediary.

Ferrante becomes attuned to stories that illuminate the slipperiness of storytelling: “books that discuss how difficult it is to tell a story and yet intensify the desire to do it”.

And there is a dissatisfaction that  I had not felt about realism when I started working on "Chasing Ashes." Although I think I was sensitive to it.

But I did find books that made me want to keep writing once I started again.

Back to the review, something I think inspirational:

“I’ve never stopped believing in the importance of the writing we’ve inherited, which the ‘I’ who writes … is made of,” Ferrante tells us.

The challenge, I thought and think, is to learn to use with freedom the cage we’re shut up in.

With fascism on the rise, the world needs the humanity of fiction.

 sch 4/26/22